Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
Many people are focused on duplicate content penalties. I've haven't seen the duplicate content issues as big a problem as people make it out to be but here are some very helpful tips on handling vBulletin to reduce any chance of duplicate indexing.
1) disable the "search engine friendly" archive. All this does is create a duplicate copy of your entire site, which is what we are trying to avoid.
2) Add the following entries to your robots.txt file This will stop bots from crawling pages they don't need to crawl:
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /clientscript/
Disallow: /cpstyles/
Disallow: /customavatars/
Disallow: /customprofilepics/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /sendmessage.php
Disallow: /sendpm.php3) eliminate the " « Previous Thread | Next Thread » " bread crumb at the bottom of threads. This can be found near the bottom of the "SHOW THREADS" template. The problem is that these two links create two additional copies of threads (e.g. /forum/showthread.php?t=87654&goto=nextoldest). This is bad, very bad and how many people actually notice these links actually exist let alone use them? Oh and yes DP needs to kill these two links.
This is good advice for any CMS. Just use the robots.txt file to handle the principal crawlers and keep one's site out of trouble. Some of these shopping sites should do the same thing with their multiple access points to the same material.
By Alec
SEO |
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
As most of you know by now we are big users of Ecto for editing our weblogs, across all platforms including WordPress and Typepad. Lack of Ecto support for WordPress is one of the main reasons I stuck with Typepad so long. Ecto just makes things so much faster and more convenient.
One very large irritation when using Ecto with WordPress is the inability to get a hold of the Pages section via XML-RPC. Developer Adriaan Tijsseling is tired of questions about why doesn't this work, pointing out quite curtly in his Ecto 3 progress notes that it's not in his power to fix:
Pages isn't in the API for editing blogs, so if you want to edit pages, you have to ask WP to allow editing pages via the API. It's nothing any blog client can implement.
There are two solutions out there. One is to modify the core WordPress files, specifically wp-includes/functions-post.php.
John prefers that we not modify any core files for the sake of future compatibility (we got burned on this on what is now a very difficult upgrade on another CMS platform).
Andrew Grant has come up with a WordPress plugin to allow all sorts of games with keywords and to improve compatibility with Windows Live Writer (whatever WLW is).
His plugin has some side benefits:
Static Wordpress pages (e.g. ‘About’) can be edited via Ecto / Windows Live Writer.
I suspect we'll go this route. Unfortunately I want to edit my pages now (and need Ecto to do so efficiently).
We'll get there.
By Alec
WordPress |
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
This is a great commercial website which has really taken advantage of online video - they call it Topskips TV but it's really just rubbish bins.
A very visual demonstration of their rubbish containers of different sizes, it's certainly easy to watch.
Topskips TV has convinced of the value of video on the web. It certainly beats all those terrible camstasia cameras recorded computer screens.
We plan to bring video to most of foliovision clients websites in the new year.
Finally, we'll go full circle - from television producer to web design company to online marketing company to television producer!
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
